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Chapter 2: The Lilies in the Field Are Enlightened

This is the situation; always it is so, in everything it is so. You want to purchase a car, and it is the same: whether to purchase a Chevrolet, or a Ford or a Benz? If your wife is not there to help you, you will never purchase any car! Women are more decisive; they are still less in the mind than men. They function out of the heart; their feeling side is still alive. Fortunately, they are not yet so civilized; they are still primitive, a little wild, leaning towards the intuitive and not towards the intellect, still capable and courageous enough to act decisively, to act intuitively, to act illogically.

All decisions come from the heart. The mind is never decisive, it cannot be. If you want to decide through the mind, you never can. I am not talking about great things like enlightenment and the existence of God or the existence of life after death. I am not talking about great things, just small things - whether to purchase this soap or that, or which toothpaste - and you will find the same difficulty. The mind is fragmentary, divided. Hence my consistent insistence that you get out of the mind and start living. The mind only thinks and never lives. It thinks beautiful thoughts, but they are thoughts all the same, just dreams.

Get out of the mind if you want to live. Get out of the mind if you want to live this moment. The mind cannot live in this moment, because it has to decide first, and the moment is lost in thinking, and by the time the mind has decided - if it ever decides - that moment is gone already. You are always lagging behind. The mind is always running after life, and lagging behind and missing it continuously.

Many of you must have dreamed something like this: Anand Maitreya continuously dreams that he is going to catch a train, and in the dream, he always misses it. Many people, I think almost everybody, has dreams of that kind - that you are just going to make it, just going to make it.and you miss it. By the time you reach the platform, the train has left. You see it leaving, but it is too late; you cannot get on it.

Anand Maitreya’s dream is a very significant dream and a universal one. This is simply how the mind functions; this dream symbolizes the mind: it is always missing the train. It is bound to be so, because the mind takes time to think, and time cannot stop for you; it goes on and on slipping out of your hands.

You never have two moments together in your hands, only one single moment. It is such a small moment that there is no space for thinking to move, no space for thoughts to exist. Either you can live it, or you can think. To live it is to be enlightened; to think is to miss.

Enlightenment is not a goal that you have to decide whether to accept it or not. It is not a goal. Enlightenment is the realization that we have only the present moment to live. The next moment is not certain - it may come, it may not come.

In fact, tomorrow never comes. It is always arriving and arriving, but never arrives. The mind lives in the tomorrows - and life is possible only in the present.

Jesus says to his disciples, “Look at the lilies in the field, how beautiful they are! Even the great Solomon was not so beautiful attired in all his grandeur as these poor lily flowers.” What is the secret? The secret is that they think not of the morrow. They live now; they live here.